Day 7: Mitchell: More than just a corn palace

After a great day yesterday in Savage, MN we woke to pancakes and bacon and blueberries for breakfast, a brand-spanking-new ice cooler, and plans to visit the Spam museum, the corn palace, and drive 500 miles. We managed to visit the Spam museum, which is fully of Spammy goodness--a wall of spam, a movie and short play about Spam, exhibits on the marketing of Spam and its creation, the significance of Spam in WWII and how it was used to feed both American and Russian troops, a simulated Spam canning exhibit, a quiz show on Spam facts--not Spam trivia, because, as our hosts reminds us, there is nothing trivial about Spam.  My favorite fact that I learned was not actually about Spam--it was that Dinty Moore stew was invented because Hormel was in the middle of producing canned food for the government in a program that was suddenly cut, leaving it with hundreds of thousands of cans and nothing to put in them...Dinty Moore was the solution. 


Below: Gracie Allen interviews Spam about its past

The wall of Spam, made of thousands of Spam cans

On the way to Mitchell, SD, home of the corn palace, we decided to stop in to Sioux Falls and see the eponymous falls (actually we ended up parking near what seemed to be white supremacist bikers on the way in, but they didn't cause any trouble, although their vehicles were testament to the fact that South Dakota does not have emissions standards).  The falls actually do exist and are rather pretty...they're really a series of falls more than a single waterfall.  The rock faces around them are also very dramatic...very red rocks that seem to have been naturally "carved" into bricks, probably a result of getting scraped by a glacier?  

Unfortunately, our trip to the corn palace was interrupted 5 miles outside its home in Mitchell, SD when our car started rumbling and the check engine light came on. We limped along to Mitchell and a friendly clerk at the only open auto store (it was 5:45pm on a Sunday) pulled our code: "cylinder 4 misfire". Although the car drives OK (albeit with an annoying rumble and lurch), we decided to stop in Mitchell (which appears to be the auto repair capital of South Dakota--we must not be the only people who have this problem) for the night so as to avoid damaging our catalytic converter. 

The good news is that our road trip plan has built-in slack for dealing with a car problem or two, and the auto shop guy we called (who has an emergency number and would have come help us tonight but for his church throwing a goodbye party for his preacher who is going to Africa for six months) will look at it early in the morning for us.  Given the ratio of Mitchell auto-related business to Mitchell inhabitants (1:335), I think we're not the only person to stop by with a similar problem.

Our mechanic is kinda religious

Auto related shops as far as the eye can see

So we relaxed and went to a nice Mexican restaurant about a mile from the hotel, which gave us a chance to walk through the gauntlet of auto shops that seems to make up the majority of Mitchell.  We also found out that they are very proud of the Corn Palace.

Also, after reading reviews of the Corn Palace on Trip Advisor, we decided it wasn't worth the walk, so we'll either drive by it tomorrow or look at some photos online and pretend like they are huge and in 3d.